by Hodge, Brian
She was close. So close to joining. But something stopped her, a barrier, perhaps a last, fragile wisp of faith. A love, still burning. A child, children not yet born.
She closed her eyes against the blood. Strained to hear more than the driving music, the tinkle of beer bottles and laughter. She yearned for the sound of screams, the humanity of their terror and pain. But she feared what would happen if the crowd did find its voice and called to her from its raw and wounded hearts.
She backed away. Ran back to the car. Drove off, past the square, back down to the main road, until she had to stop, to throw up, weep.
Weak, hollowed, Isabella tried again to reach Hugh at the office. She went down her call list, the families, neighbors, other numbers—the school nurse, teachers, the plumber, their attorney. Some numbers were busy. Most went to voicemail. Others connected only to disappear into silence. She called the police, held on for a few minutes as the recording instructed, hung up.
She drove searching for comfort in empty streets. A van came up behind her. In the rear view mirror, the driver wore sunglasses and a t-shirt. Behind the driver, the van appeared filled with shadowy bodies. She pulled over, heart racing, not sure if she wanted the van to pull over or keep to going. In the moment of vulnerability, she yearned for Hugh’s presence, for family and friends to surround her, for the company and security of the world she knew. Empty streets were no comfort.
The van passed, filled with children who looked out and down on her with wide-eyed and somber expressions. The driver had the radio turned up, and a voice theatrically boomed the thunder of the end of days through the front passenger-side’s open window.
A part of her wanted to chase down the van and claim responsibility for driving the kids home. She hesitated, hanging on Hugh, to the dream of their future, their children. Selfish, she knew. With the world shrinking, selfishness did not seem so bad.
The van turned off to a side street. She waited a few more minutes before going back on the road.
She came up on the restaurant she’d planned to order from for dinner. The place was open, with three cars in the lot. She stopped. It was early, she wasn’t sure if the place would remain open for dinner time. Delivery seemed like an outdated luxury.
Inside, the single cook looked out from the kitchen, while a busboy sat at the bar talking to a waiter. A couple sat at the end, having cocktails. Frank Sinatra sang in the background. Isabella sat at the other end. The waiter took her order and gave her a martini on the house.
The television over the bar was off. The waiter stayed to himself behind the middle of the bar, staring down, absently flicking a towel at a knee-high cabinet latch.
Near home, she stopped at a hardware depot and picked up extra batteries in case the power went out. Two young women stood at the same register by the door and waved her by when she went to pay. They turned their attention to another customer walking out through another register with a generator on a dolly, also without paying. She wanted to ask how they were doing, what was happening, but they turned their backs to her and whispered to each other.
Isabella was shaking by the time she pulled into the driveway. She sat in the car, feet out, hunched over, to ride the wave of nausea that carried her past her unease to a prickly state of panic. She looked over every detail of the house, the neighborhood, searching for something new, different. Dangerous. She waited for the voice from above to announce that something was going to happen, that the world would change in the morning.
She shivered, wiped sweat from her face. Somewhere, a dog barked. As if the ritual would calm her, she called everyone in her phone again. For most, even the ringing had stopped.
Mrs. Gernstein emerged from her house two doors down. Isabella shouted at her, heart jumping with unreasonable joy.
“Sorry,” she said, “did I hang up on you? I’m just so frustrated I haven’t been able to—”
“What is it?” her neighbor asked, breathless. The woman barely glanced at her, preoccupied with staring at the windows of the surrounding houses.
“Sorry to bother you, the calls—I don’t really know—is your phone working? Is everything ok? I mean, with your daughter, with the neighborhood—”
“Stop babbling. I don’t have time for babbling. Things aren’t right here, I have my own problems, leave me alone, you bitch, leave me the fuck alone.”
Mrs. Gernstein hurried to her mailbox, found nothing inside. She glanced down both ends of the street, picked up a small stone, threw it at the front window of the house between hers and Isabella’s, waited.
“I—I’m sorry, I guess they haven’t—”
“My period’s late,” she shouted at the neighboring house. “I was due, last week. Am I pregnant? Hello? Or did I lose something in the change?”
She made an odd noise, part yelp, part bark, and hurried back into her home.
Until that moment, Isabella hadn’t recognized the terror slipping into her like a thin, frozen sliver of ice with every newscast from a far off crisis, with each anomaly—lone standing people, abandoned cars, sirens. She hadn’t felt the chill growing in the marrow of her bones with children dropping out of school, parents disappearing, Hugh dreaming. She hadn’t recognized the sweet scent in the air, or the stench of rotting bodies. The town square had overwhelmed her, but left her uninformed.
Perhaps that’s when terror had come to live with her, waiting until now to announce itself.
She gasped, shivered. Found herself making the sign of the cross, returning to a childhood habit, her mother’s gesture for holy places and terrible news. She retreated from the world to the safety of her home and the life it sheltered.
After a shower and a change of clothes, Isabella opened one of their good bottles of wine, poured a glass and sipped slowly waiting for Hugh. She didn’t turn on the TV, listening instead to CDs, Donald Byrd, Chick Corea, Miles Davis, imagining Hugh’s hand on her back, his lips gently kissing her cheek, his lips searching for hers as they lingered over each other, his rich scent filling her with his presence.
He came back later than usual, quietly, through the evening’s darkness, and went to his office, walking past the dining room without looking in. She hadn’t turned the light on, there was no reason for him to look in.
She opened a fresh bottle to let the wine breathe. She put the empty away.
He moved around at the back, from office to bedroom to closets. Isabella closed her eyes, letting the sounds of life reassure her that everything was fine.
She shivered. No need to rush. They had all night. Don’t spoil the moment, the mood. They were together, safe. That was all that mattered.
She called him to dinner, laid out what she’d bought. He didn’t come. Surely, he knew she hadn’t gone out and left the music on. She went to him.
She wanted to say hi, to ask how he was, what he’d seen and done today, how he felt. She wanted to tell him she loved him, and to hear him say the same to her. Instead, she asked, “What are you looking for?”
He continued to dig through the hallway closet, tossing out boxes of winter clothes. Everything that had been hung up was already on the floor.
Isabella’s gut tightened. The back of Hugh’s suit jacket was torn, his pants and shoes were filthy. His hair was mussed, wild. Flashes of the back of his hands left images of torn scratched skin and bruised knuckles in Isabella’s mind.
“Is this what you forgot?” Isabella asked, holding out Hugh’s phone.
Stupid. Wrong, stupid question. Her face turned hot from embarrassment. What was the matter with her, she thought, but she knew that was also the wrong question.
When he didn’t answer, she said, “Hugh, what happened?”
She put a hand on his arm. He stopped but continued to peer into the darkness at the back of the closet.
“Hugh, do you know anything about what’s happening with your Mom? I left messages at your office. The last I heard from your Dad she was fine, but I haven’t been able to reach them since this mor
ning. Did they get you? Is—Hugh, tell me, please.”
He moved away from her hand, opened a box, dumped gloves and sweaters on to the pile of clothing already on the floor, felt his way through the mass of material. His cheeks and eyes were swollen. Dried blood crusted his lips.
“Hugh, look at me,” she said, louder, edged with the panic building up once again inside her. “What’s going on?”
Hugh looked up at her. His face, pale, slack, expressionless, was harshly illuminated by the light from the overhead fixture. Her attention slipped past battered flesh that had turned his face into a caricature.
It came to Isabella that her husband’s eyes had changed color.
In that moment, everything that had happened since the morning came back to her like a flash flood through a narrow gorge, sweeping away thoughts and feelings, memories, dreams. She cried out, a weak, desperate screech, like a hatchling’s when it first cracked through its shell and found itself in a new and terrible world. She stepped back, lost her footing on the mass of clothes and hangers, and fell.
Her head slammed into the wall. Her vision blurred, a shudder passed through her. Nausea, and then a sharp pain from the back of her head and neck, passed through her.
By the time she’d regained her senses, she thought only a few minutes had passed since she fell. She checked his phone through blurry vision. An hour had passed. Hugh never came to her, never spoke or seemed to notice what had happened even now as he stared at the back of the closet.
“Dinner’s getting cold,” she said. And laughed. She couldn’t help herself. She’d said one stupid thing after another, and here was the latest, maybe the last incongruous, out of touch thing to come out of her mouth.
She was missing something. Hugh, yes. Her children, like Mrs. Gernstein, ones she’d already had, perhaps, and forgotten, and the ones not born yet, yes. Mom, Dad, the family, her friends, job, yes to all of that. And something else.
She was floating in air. It was the ground that had abandoned her.
“Hugh,” she called out, hoping he’d turn to her, see her ridiculous position, and join in her laughter, laugh at the both of them for acting like idiots.
She went to him, stood in his way. He stared through her at something that made him look like he was about to cry.
His eyes were a milk grey along the outer rim of the iris, transitioning inward through darker shaded rings until they became charcoal before sinking into the widened blackness of his pupils.
His scent had changed, as well. His particular scent, the one born from his brand of aftershave cream, body lotion, deodorant, from his sweat and the food he usually ate for lunch, was gone.
In its place was a thick, floral smell accompanied by traces of a sweet rot, like a flower shop forsaken by its owner. A touch of smoke, a hint of shit, piss and blood, rounded out the bouquet.
She leaned on him. Waited for him to hold her.
Floating, on the brink of falling, she thought of enormous jungle flowers blooming once in a lifetime, exuding the stench of rotting corpses to draw prey into their acidic hearts.
She screamed. Fell back into the closet. Threw his phone at him.
It bounced off of his head. He picked it up. His random manipulation turned it on. Somehow, he managed to call someone. His mother’s voice mail message answered.
She went back to the dining room, poured more wine. The room was spinning, but she didn’t mind. The sensation was comforting in its familiarity. She moved on to the living room where she turned on the television and sat down so she could keep an eye on the hallway leading to the back of the house. Dinner remained cold, untouched. She had to wait until she stopped shaking to drink.
He came out once, stared at her, and said in a hoarse, gravelly voice, as if he’d been screaming most of the day at work, “I’m not hungry.” He returned to his work.
The television stations had returned to regular programming, re-running sitcoms and reality shows. The movie channels were running comedies. Some of the news channels were cycling old interviews and reports, others showed historical documentaries, wars and natural disasters from which people had already recovered. The rest were off-air, as if exhausted by all that had happened. On a local community channel, a bearded man leaned forward asking for anyone who could see or hear him to call in because everyone was disappearing and he was scared.
She finished the second bottle, started a third. The days she’d just lived ran through her mind. A gust of change blew through them, raising details she’d ignored, obscuring the familiar she was still trying to cling to. There’d been too many accidents, close by. Not enough on the news. Disease had been the threat, the future’s poison. Nothing as fast as bomb or a rock from space. The town square—she backed away from that memory, closed her eyes, waited for the touch of an apocalyptic hand reaching through a curtain of routines.
She dreamed, it seemed for a moment, about twin boys, and a girl, calling her Mommy. They were going to the State Park. Hugh was outside. Calling them. But when they went through the door, it was night, the car was gone, and the street was filled with people waiting. She and the children searched for Hugh but couldn’t find him. A voice announced that they had to wait for the morning for further instructions.
Isabella opened her eyes to the living room and its silence.
She remembered Hugh’s car. She hadn’t heard him pull into the driveway before he came inside. She checked the front of the house. It wasn’t on the street or driveway, and she would have heard the garage door opening.
He’d walked home. Something had happened to him, forcing him to abandon the car, on the highway or a local street.
In the darkness of their house, she saw herself passing it, in the morning, coming home, oblivious. If she’d driven slower, paid attention to the side streets, she might have seen him making his way back to her. Maybe, she could have saved him from whoever had assaulted him on the way.
In the kitchen, poking a finger into cold food in a carton, she missed the counter putting down her wine. The crack of glass shattering on ceramic tile shot through dream and the future. Wine splattered on her leg.
Face in hands, she broke with the glass, felt the life she’d wanted with the man she’d loved splash and trickle across cold tile. She wept at the emptiness of the nest in which their children would have grown up.
When she had nothing left, when she’d been hollowed like the world around her, a scene, like a dream of a commercial for a vacation getaway, came to her of Hugh stumbling out of his car, lost in the place so many others had gone to, walking, walking, to home, to her. Not following a scent, or call, or vision, never surrendering to a violent horde of ravenous flesh. Choosing, instead, to come back to the shadows of what he’d left behind.
She checked on Hugh shuffling back and forth in his office, moving books, equipment, and furniture in a restless cycle. She put a hand on his shoulder as he passed. He ignored her. She went to bed. Closed her eyes. Waited for true sleep, for the peace a good rest and Hugh’s touch could give her. The wine, she thought, would not let her find what she wanted.
He came to bed much later and lay down next to her. He was cold, his flesh stone hard. She turned on the light. He lay on his side, in the fetal position, naked on top of the sheets. He’d cleaned himself up in the basement bathroom, washed away blood. Poured on cologne.
She turned to face him. He was a curved shape carved from night. She took his hand. His fingers lay limp in her palm. She put an arm over his shoulder, pulled his hand to her breast. Waited for the man who loved her to awaken, to show her the place he’d gone to. To surrender to her.
She called his name. He drew a raspy breath. Croaked, an echo from unknown depths. His breath smelled like spoiled meat.
She squeezed his hand. Kissed him, gently, on the cheek, his nose and eyes, his chin, hands. She drew his other arm around her shoulder and held him. Hugged him. His erection pressed against her thigh, but he remained still, as if locked in a broken memory of w
hat had and was supposed to happen.
She felt the storm of the world pushing them apart, held on tighter. She jumped into his depths, through eyes sealed by darkness, searching for the faintest star of a memory, a flicker of recognition, an ember of feeling.
Her passion found nothing by which to navigate. Her hunger found nothing to feed on from him, from herself. She held on for a while, eyes closed. When she opened them again, she slipped from his body and lay on her side, staring at him.
His pupils seemed darker, and she thought something might be swimming in them. But later, after he’d gotten up, opened the garage door and began emptying it, she knew what she’d seen had only been in her imagination.
She listened to Hugh walk up and down the driveway, emptying the garage. Some things he dragged, most he carried and dropped. Metal and glass rattled the silence.
He stopped walking down the driveway. The garage door came down. Quiet settled back into the soft corners of the world.
The silence, the garage, the neighborhood and all the lay beyond wouldn’t let her sleep.
Isabella sat up. Turned on the radio, tuned through silence and static to find two college stations playing non-stop rock, a preacher begging for forgiveness, an emergency broadcast announcement asking listeners to stand by for further instructions.
She dressed, took the car keys. Stood in the doorway. The street lamps were on, but everyone’s house lights were off. Mrs. Gernstein wasn’t letting anyone know she was home, if she still was.
She had to do something. Anything. Take control. Fight back against the intangible dream taking over the world.
Isabella thought of driving to a nearby mall where the big box store sold guns. She’d get a shotgun. A revolver. She’d heard they didn’t jam. And lots of shells. She’d bring a flashlight, in case the store lights were out. Stock up on food. Water, just in case. Batteries. More and better flashlights. A generator, maybe more than one. She jotted down items on a piece of paper on the way to her car.